Midnights Children

away by a tide of history in which sons (high and low) were frequently observed to behave exceptionally badly. (No: I do not exempt myself.)
    Divorce between news and reality: newspapers quoted foreign economists— PAKISTAN A MODEL FOR EMERGING NATIONS —while peasants (unreported) cursed the so-called “green revolution,” claiming that most of the newly-drilled water-wells had been useless, poisoned, and in the wrong places anyway; while editorials praised the probity of the nation’s leadership, rumors, thick as files, mentioned Swiss bank accounts and the new American motor-cars of the President’s son. The Karachi
Dawn
spoke of another dawn— GOOD INDO-PAK RELATIONS JUST AROUND THE CORNER? —but, in the Rann of Kutch, yet another inadequate son was discovering a different story.
    In the cities, mirages and lies; to the north, in the high mountains, the Chinese were building roads and planning nuclear blasts; but it is time to revert from the general to the particular; or, to be more exact, to the General’s son, my cousin, the enuretic Zafar Zulfikar. Who became, between April and July, the archetype of all the many disappointing sons in the land; history, working through him, was also pointing its finger at Gauhar, at future-Sanjay and Kanti-Lal-to-come; and, naturally, at me.
    So—cousin Zafar. With whom I had much in common at that time … my heart was full of forbidden love; his trousers, despite all his efforts, filled continually with something rather more tangible, but equally forbidden. I dreamed of mythical lovers, both happy and star-crossed—Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal, but also Montague-and-Capulet; he dreamed of his Kifi fiancée, whose failure to arrive at puberty even after her sixteenth birthday must have made her seem, in his thoughts, a fantasy of an unattainable future … in April 1965, Zafar was sent on maneuvers to the Pakistan-controlled zone of the Rann of Kutch.
    Cruelty of the continent towards the loose-bladdered: Zafar, although a Lieutenant, was the laughing-stock of the Abbottabad military base. There was a story that he had been instructed to wear a rubber undergarment like a balloon around his genitals, so that the glorious uniform of the Pak Army should not be desecrated; mere jawans, when he passed, would make a blowing movement of their cheeks, as if they were puffing up the balloon. (All this became public later, in the statement he made, in floods of tears, after his arrest for murder.) It is possible that Zafar’s assignment to the Rann of Kutch was thought up by a tactful superior, who was only trying to get him out of the firing-line of Abbottabad humor … Incontinence doomed Zafar Zulfikar to a crime as heinous as my own. I loved my sister; while he … but let me tell the story the right way up.
    Ever since Partition, the Rann had been “disputed territory”; although, in practice, neither side had much heart for the dispute. On the hillocks along the 23rd parallel, the unofficial frontier, the Pakistan Government had built a string of border posts, each with its lonely garrison of six men and one beacon-light. Several of these posts were occupied on April 9th, 1965, by troops of the Indian Army; a Pakistani force, including my cousin Zafar, which had been in the area on maneuvers, engaged in an eighty-two-day struggle for the frontier. The war in the Rann lasted until July 1st. That much is fact; but everything else lies concealed beneath the doubly hazy air of unreality and make-believe which affected all goings-on in those days, and especially all events in the phantasmagoric Rann … so that the story I am going to tell, which is substantially that told by my cousin Zafar, is as likely to be true as anything; as anything, that is to say, except what we were officially told.
    … As the young Pakistani soldiers entered the marshy terrain of the Rann, a cold clammy perspiration broke out on their foreheads, and they were unnerved by the greeny sea-bed quality of the light; they recounted stories which frightened them even more, legends of terrible things which happened in this amphibious zone, of demonic sea-beasts with glowing eyes, of fish-women who lay with their fishy heads underwater, breathing, while their perfectly-formed and naked human lower halves lay on the shore, tempting the unwary into fatal sexual acts, because it is well known that nobody may love a fish-woman and live … so that by the time they reached the border posts and went to